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San Francisco Chronicle - Bay Area Dems Meet with Joe Biden on Guns

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Rep. Jackie Speier, D-San Mateo, said Vice President Joe Biden, head of the White House task force on gun violence, told a group of Democrats in a meeting Monday that the administration has identified 19 actions it can take independently of Congress to restrict guns.

But Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Napa, who heads a separate task force convened by House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, said "meaningful progress" on reducing gun violence "cannot be made by just one branch of government." Speier is a vice chair on the Thompson task force.

Over the weekend the president of the National Rifle Association predicted that Obama would not be able to get an assault weapons ban through Congress.

Biden has delivered recommendations to the White House and could make them public later this week. The Thompson task force expects to make its recommendations in early February.

Speier herself was shot when she was accompanying the late Rep. Leo Ryan, a south San Francisco Democrat, on a fact-finding mission to Jonestown in 1978.

Speier was a legal aide to Ryan and 28 years old. She was shot five times.

President Obama said at a press conference Monday that his is committed to a ban on assault weapons and high capacity magazines.

Speier implied that some of the executive actions could include import controls.